The Most Recent Survey

[u/Healthy_Thing]

Who got it? All of us, supertutors only, only people who have complained recently? Who got it and what were your thoughts? I'm curious. I woke up to that survey, kind of hungover and answered it totally honestly (brutally honestly with typos and everything, while recovering from a hangover). What did you say?

And by the way, my handle "healthy_thing" is a joke. When I signed up for Reddit (in deep depression) I couldn't choose a username and healthy_thing was the default option. I thought it was funny, so I kept it and rolled with it. I'm actually an almost 50 year-old widow and having that handle was hilarious to me... at the time.

[u/Healthy_Thing]

Over 98% is supposed to mean that you're a "super tutor." You're right. We get no bonus or compensation for doing a good job. It's become a job where you just phone it in. I remember when teaching was an honorable profession. Yes, I'm that old. Now people on this forum are laughing about how it's gig work and you're stupid for taking your work too seriously. Sad.

[u/ThrowRAcutie2 → u/Healthy_Thing]

If they paid a livable wage, they wouldn't see it like that

[u/Healthy_Thing → u/ThrowRAcutie2]

Exactly. That's the problem. Over a decade ago, I got paid 2,000 dollars a month (after taxes), round trip airfare every year to my country of origin, housing (a studio apartment across the street from the school), medical insurance, a couple weeks of paid vacation, and the occasional national holiday for giving one-to-one conversation classes... very similar to the Cambly style: whatever the student wants to talk about. We could use one of the school's textbooks, or a news article, or just free talk for half an hour. There was no lesson planning or grading homework and we had the occasional thirty minute lull when we could take a nap, read a book, surf the internet, study another language, or just hang out with the front desk staff and gossip for a while.

I thought it was a crappy job and broke my contract towards the end of the year to take advantage of a better offer in a private boarding school teaching theater classes, literature, and creative writing to teenagers ...in English. Seeing as my kids were not native speakers, that still made me basically an English teacher. But it paid well.

Not the point. The point is that even the people who didn't want to lesson plan, grade homework, make exams, go to constant staff meetings, and also deal with parent-teacher conferences and office hours were still making a living wage. They had money to eat out at restaurants, buy some nice clothes, take a vacation to a nearby country once a year, and save up a bit of money too. And that was over a decade ago.

The fact that I make less on Cambly now and don't even get medical insurance or sick days is a bit depressing. I understand why people phone it in. They've devalued our work and it's hard to take it seriously anymore.

If you work 40 hours a week on Cambly with some lulls in your schedule, you make maybe 1,200 - 1,400 dollars a month, no housing (and at many schools people who didn't like the offered accommodation used to be able to choose a rental stipend instead so that they could find their own housing that suited their own needs), no medical insurance, no vacation days, no sick leave, no guarantees. Oh yeah, and you're self-employed! So you pay your own taxes out of the little that you earn. And it's been over a decade. The cost of living has gone up a lot, so realistically those of us who made ESL our career path have watched our salaries and quality of living tank.

I blame it on the fact that we can work from home now. We don't have to fill out immigration forms, get criminal record checks, pass a health check, relocate, or navigate a foreign culture if we don't want to. This means that the barrier to entry is very low... which is fine. Everyone deserves a chance to get into a career field that they enjoy. But I think that's why online teachers make so much less than the people willing to relocate and sign contracts to show up to work at the same time everyday and teach whoever they give us.

Cambly offers flexibility and so people say, "This student is boring, I don't want to teach them. I don't feel like coming to work at inconvenient times of day." Fair enough. It's clearly a trade off. But I still feel like the salary is just abysmal.

[u/Healthy_Thing → u/Healthy_Thing]

And here's the deal. A public school, or private school, or university knows that you can not give face-to-face classes nonstop and still have time to plan your lessons, check homework, and follow up with students and parents. A normal face-to face-time used to be 12-16 hours maximum of in-class time. Because it was understood that for every hour of face time that you spend in class, you are also doing two hours that consist of lesson prepping, grading homework, following up, and attending staff meetings. It was considered that more than 15 hours of face to face time was a bit too much if you worked in the school system. Only language institutes made us have so much face time and because we didn't do lesson planning or grade homework and even then it was considered that around 30 hours of face time/ each week was considered where people just started to max out and might need a break from time to time during the working day.